2016 Quilt

Each year I try to sew one quilt while I plug away half-time in school and full time work. It's usually when I get the long summer break that I can fit in the time, but it's my first love of fiber arts, and finishing them brings a real comforting joy.

This year I decided to burn through some excess fabric scraps instead of buying more fabric to sew with. Also, my goal was to use what I had on hand instead of buying anything for this quilt-such as batting, thread or the backing. It's amazing what creativity can do for you if you use what you got!

The backing is an old fleece blanket from IKEA that was in excellent shape, and no batting was used. A simple stitch-in-the-ditch was the quilting on this one to make it simple. I am very pleased with this one, especially considering it didn't cost me anything other that what was already on hand.

The blue scrap quilt finished

She is finally done. 

http://www.kerriannjohnson.com/2013/01/blue-scraps-handquilting.html

Blue Scraps-Handquilting

Quilting is not an inexpensive hobby. Fabric can cost $5-10 per yard, plus the batting and backing. It can cost well over $50 or more to make a simple quilt.

This is where saved scraps come in; it greatly reduces the costs of the quilt top (maybe even the backing or batting) when saved from previous sewing projects. I don't have a large a large scrap stash because I use my scraps to gratify the quilting urge when finances are lean. Now is such a time, and it's quite amazing what can be produced with what is already on hand.

I have produced a few scrap quilts, some donated to the Linus project, and others given to family members. The great challenge in scrap quilts is to get them to appease the eye. It requires coordination of the right colors and of course ensuring enough scraps will make the right size product.

My latest scrap project was very gratifying. It blended many scraps from other quilts that had a lot of calming blues. I like blue, but it seems that I have done so much with it lately. This quilt has eaten up a lot of my scrap stash in blue so I can count on not feeling that obligation to do another blue quilt anytime soon.

This quilt will be about 54" wide by 67" long, not quite a twin size, but a large lap quilt. Since the size is just too much to quilt on my machine, I am hand-quilting it on my Ulmer quilting frame. I have only used this frame once for my prized wedding quilt, but it is a tool I will use for the rest of my life (at least as long as I can quilt).

Next post hopefully will show the finished product!